Published byStanford Medicine

Everyone loves the holidays, but, as the season marches on, many people (myself included) find themselves wishing they were a bit better at restraining themselves around holiday treats. If you’re open to creative suggestions, you might appreciate the results of a recent study in Science.

In that study, researchers asked study participants to imagine eating M&Ms before offering them different quantities of the candy. And Nobel Intent reports:

It turns out that the more M&Ms a participant imagined eating, the fewer they actually ate when the candies were in front of them. People that imagined eating 30 candies ate half as many M&Ms as those who imagined eating just three did.